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Raynal, Abbé. A History of the Two Indies: A Translated Selection of Writings from Raynal's “Histoire philosophique et politique des établissements des Européens dans les Deux Indes”. Ed. Peter Jimack. Aldershot, England & Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. xxix + 287 pp. £60. ISBN 0–7546–4043–4, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 3, JULY 2007, Pages 324–325, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cqm038
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Raynal's text was hugely successful in the eighteenth century, before being forgotten in the nineteenth. Peter Jimack's introduction provides a very useful history of the text, a discussion of its authorship (including the contribution made by Diderot), and an overview of the significant historical and philosophical issues which it raises. The text itself constitutes an Enlightenment manifesto against religious fanaticism and political oppression (pace Raynal's ambivalent attitude towards slavery), and is prescient in its call for a European Court of Justice and in its pan-European political vision. It is also a mine of information about eighteenth-century views on a number of issues, such as the importance of trade and/or population as sources of wealth, and complements the writings of other contemporary travel writers, such as Du Halde and Prévost. Since, as the editor points out, neither the French original nor the English translation is readily available, this volume of extracts (translated by the editor) will be immensely valuable to readers across a wide range of disciplines.
